Radio Free Albemuth Read online

  “Okay!” I interrupted. “I know it was the authorities who broke into my house because the house behind me was evacuated. And the black family that lives there has ten children, so someone is always there, constantly. The night of the burglary I noticed the house behind me was completely empty, and it stayed empty an entire week. And the broken windows and doors of my house were all in the rear, adjoining it. No private burglars would evacuate a whole house. It was the authorities.”

  “They’ll get you again, Phil,” Nicholas said. “Probably they wanted to see what your next book is about. What is your next book about, anyhow?”

  “Not you,” I said. “I can tell you that.”

  “Did they find the MS?”

  “The MS of my new book,” I told him, “was in my attorney’s safe. I transferred it there a month before the hit on my house.”

  “What’s the book about?”

  After a pause I said. “A police state in America modeled on the Soviet Gulag prison system. A police slave-labor state here. It’s called Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.”

  “Why’d you put the manuscript in your lawyer’s safe?”

  I said, reluctantly. “Well, I—shit, Nick. To tell you the truth, I had a dream.”

  Silence for a time.

  10NICHOLAS had been right to be apprehensive about the FAP interest in him. Not long thereafter, as he sat at his desk in his office at Progressive Records, listening to a tape of a new singer, two FAPers paid him a surprise visit.

  The two government agents had fat red necks and both wore modern single-breasted polyester suits and stylish ties. They were middle-aged and heavyset; they carried briefcases, which they placed on the desk between them and Nicholas. Nicholas was reminded of the two FBI agents who had visited him years ago in Berkeley, but this time he was not scared and angry; he was just scared.

  “Are we putting out too many protest songs?” he said, thinking to himself that he could readily show it not to be his personal responsibility but that of the chief of A and R, Hugo Wentz.

  The greater of the two FAP agents said. “No, as a matter of fact your firm has a three-check rating with us, which is quite good. If anything, we’re here to compliment Progressive Records, at least in contrast to findings obtained throughout the record industry.”

  “It’s pretty bad,” the other agent chimed in. “As I’m sure you realize, Mr. Brady. A large number of Communist singers are being regularly recorded, and many protest songs are being aired these days, despite the general cooperation of the networks and major independent stations.”

  Nicholas knew it was not public policy for the radio stations to play protest songs; that was the reason Progressive Records didn’t cut them. It was pointless; no DJ would air them. It was a matter of economics, not principle.

  “We are here regarding the following spin-off of Mission Checkup,” the greater of the agents said. “In the course of your work, Mr. Brady, you must come in contact with many singers and groups whom you do not sign, correct? For every one you sign to a contract there must be a hundred you don’t.”

  Nicholas nodded.

  “We also know what salary you draw here,” the greater agent continued. “And we know you have a small son who needs major dental work, that you’re in debt, that you’d very much like to move out of your apartment into a house, that Rachel is talking about leaving you if you don’t put Johnny in a special school, because of his stammering…am I correct? We’ve talked it over with our superiors in an effort to find a way to assist you, and we’ve come up with this: If you will provide the government with a copy of the lyrics of each artist whom you come in contact with who shows pro-Communist sympathies, we will pay you a flat hundred dollars per artist. It’s our estimate that you could enhance your salary by up to two thousand dollars a month this way, and you would not have to report it to the IRS; it would be tax-free. Of course, the determination as to which artists you report are pro-Communist and which are not belongs to us; but even if we accept only half the ones you pass on to us, you should be able to—”

  “And we guarantee,” the other FAP agent broke in, “that this will remain an arrangement known only to you and to us. No one else, either at Progressive or anywhere else, will find out. You’ll receive a code name under which you report, and everything, including payments, will be filed under that. The identity of the coded informant will be known only to the two of us sitting here and to you.”

  “But if these artists aren’t signed,” Nicholas said, “what harm can they do?”

  “They can change the slant of their lyrics,” the greater agent said, “so they’re not pro-Communist, and get signed up somewhere else.”

  Nicholas said. “But if the lyrics aren’t subversive any more, what does it matter? Why do you care about them then?”

  The greater agent said. “Once they make it big they can again begin to sneak subversive poisons into their lyrics. And by that time it’s very difficult to eradicate them, once they’re known to the public, you see; once they’ve made it big. That’s potentially a very dangerous situation: someone who slips something controversial in with ordinary lyrics and then begins to further slant them later on. So you can see why we don’t merely go on who’s recorded and being played; we need to know the names of those who aren’t.”

  “They in some ways are the most dangerous,” the other agent said.

  That night Nicholas told me about this interview with the two government agents. He was angry by then, angry and shaking.

  “You going to take them up on it?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” Nicholas said. But then he said. “You know, I can’t really believe the government is concerned with those loser artists. I think it’s my loyalty they’re interested in. Those two FAPers; it was a ploy to test me. They knew all about me; obviously there’s a file on me back in Washington.”

  “There’s a file on all of us,” I said.

  “If they know about Johnny’s overbite and what Rachel’s been saying to me, they undoubtedly know about my contacts with Valis. I’d better burn my notes.”

  “What,” I said, “would a file on Valis look like? A file on a superior life form in another star system… I wonder how it’d be cross-indexed. I wonder if it’d have a special marking.”

  “They’ll get at Valis through me,” Nicholas said.

  “Valis will protect you,” I said.

  “Then you don’t think I should do it?”

  “Hell, no,” I said. I was amazed at him.

  “But they’ll think I’m disloyal if I say no. That’s what they’re after: proof of disloyalty. They’ll have it!”

  “Fuck ’em,” I said. “Say no anyhow.”

  “Then they’ll know. And I’ll be in Nebraska.”

  I said, “They’ve got you, then. Either way.”

  “That’s right,” Nicholas said. “Ever since the two FBI agents closed in on me back in the fifties. I knew it would catch up with me, my disloyal past. My Berkeley days—the reason I left the university.”

  “You broke your gun.”

  “I disabled my gun! I was a war protestor even then, one of the first. I knew Fremont’s minions would find me out; they only had to examine their files. The computers popped me up, the first antiwar activist in America. And now it’s cooperate with them or be arrested.”

  “I was never arrested,” I said, “and I’ve done a lot more antiwar stuff than you. In fact, you haven’t done any since you left Berkeley. Since the FBI came by that day.”

  “That proves nothing. I’m a sleeper. They probably think it’s Aramchek that contacts me in the night. Valis is my name for Radio Free Aramchek.”

  “Aramchek is a word on a sidewalk.”

  “Aramchek is anything that opposes Fremont. Listen, Phil.” Nicholas inhaled a deep, ragged breath. “I think I’m going to have to play ball with them, or anyhow appear to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Nicholas said, “look what happened to you. Your
place broken into, half your papers gone—you haven’t been able to write since, for psychological reasons, for practical reasons; good lord, look at you—your nerves are shot. I know you’re not able to sleep any more, expecting them to come back and do it again, or maybe arrest you. I can see what it’s done to you; after all, I’m your best friend.”

  “I’ll live,” I said.

  “You don’t have a wife and little boy,” Nicholas said quietly. “You live alone, Phil; you don’t have any family-. What if the night they broke all the back windows and smashed down the doors your little son had been home, alone? They might have—”

  “They waited,” I said, “until I was out of the house; they were outside for a week getting ready—I saw them. They waited until the house was empty.”

  Nicholas said. “The government hires ex-’Nam special forces veterans for commando raids like that. Search and seize, they call it. A military operation with military personnel using plastic military explosives—I saw the combat boot point they left in the closet of your study; you showed it to me. Phil, those were armed soldiers who hit your house. And I have Rachel and Johnny.”

  “You go along with them,” I said, “and maybe your body lives, but your soul dies.”

  “I’ll feed them names they can’t use,” Nicholas said. “Lurid rock lyrics that don’t mean anything.”

  “And how’ll you explain it to yourself when they arrest one of the loser artists you rat on?”

  Nicholas gazed at me unhappily. In all the years I had known him I’d never seen such a wretched expression on his face.

  “Because they will,” I said. “And you know it. They may still arrest me. It’s still hanging over my head.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Nicholas said. “And I don’t want that hanging over my head, for Rachel’s sake and for Johnny’s sake. I want to be with my little son as he grows up; it’s the most precious thing in my life. I don’t want to be in a forced labor detention camp in the boondocks hoeing turnips.”

  “Ferris Fremont hasn’t just taken over the country,” I said. “He’s also taken over human minds. And debased them.”

  “The Bible says don’t judge,” Nicholas said.

  “The Bible says, ‘My kingdom is not of this world,’” I answered angrily. “Which means there’s a lot of explaining to do later on.”

  “I’ve got plenty of explaining to do right here.”

  “Not half of what comes later. Have you asked Valis what to do?”

  “I don’t ask Valis; he, they, tell me.”

  “Tell them to tell you not to cooperate.”

  “So far they’ve said nothing. If they say nothing then I go ahead as I normally would.”

  “You cooperate with Mission Fuck-Up,” I said (this was what we all derisively called it), “and I’ll bet you a buck Valis never communicates with you again.”

  “I will have to do what I have to do,” Nicholas said.

  “Are you going to report to them about me too?” I said. “About my writing?”

  “They can read your writing; it’s all published.”

  “You could clue them in about Flow My Tears, since it isn’t out yet. You know what it’s about.”

  “I’m sorry, Phil,” Nicholas said. “But my wife and child come first.”

  “For this,” I said bitterly. “I moved to Southern California.”

  “Phil, I can’t afford for them to find out about Valis. I’m sorry, but that is too important. More important than you or me or anyone else.”

  I didn’t like the notion of a close friend of mine reporting regularly, for money, to the minions of Ferris Fremont. When I considered to myself that Nicholas knew everything there was to know about me, it became oppressively close and menacing in a very personal way. “If Valis exists,” I said, “he’ll protect you, as you told me a long time ago. And if he doesn’t exist, then you have nothing to protect and therefore no motive for cooperating with them. Either way you should tell them to go shove it.” In actuality I was thinking of my own self. I hadn’t really done all that much antiwar activity, or contemplated that much yet to be done, but in the eyes of the FAPers it would be sufficient. And Nicholas had been informed of every iota of it.

  It was the beginning of the first real rift in our friendship. Nicholas reluctantly agreed that he could hold out against the FAPers with their dossier on him, and still keep his family and job, but I could see that not only was he divided against me but against himself as well. The fact of the matter was that I could no longer trust my dearest friend Nicholas Brady, whom I had known and loved since the old days in Berkeley. The authorities had done their assigned job: they had driven another wedge between two men who had always trusted each other completely.

  The destruction of our relationship was a mini-cosmos mirroring what was going on at all levels of American society under F.F.F. On the basis of what had happened to us I could infer that terrible tragedies were taking place everywhere. For instance, what about the young artists coming to Progressive Records to play and sing? The record company official who auditioned them was a paid cop, informing on them to higher police authorities. Undoubtedly this was taking place at all the other record companies as well. What about Nicholas’s fellow employees? They now had—or potentially had—a paid informer in their midst, who augmented his salary at the expense of their safety and freedom. All this, so that little Johnny could go to the dentist. What a rationale.

  The real motive, of course, was Nicholas’s concern for his own freedom and safety. In effect it was a trade-off: he jeopardized, or proposed to jeopardize, the freedom and safety of others to secure his own. But the net effect of a lot of people doing this would be mutual hazard. For instance, suppose a couple of FAPers now approached me and asked me to report on Nicholas. I already knew that there was a fair chance he was reporting on me. What, then, would my reaction be? My ability to resist them would be substantially undermined.

  The well-known police tactic of whiplashing would be coming into play; they would soon be saying to me. “You better report on Nicholas Brady before he reports on you,” which meant, You had better get your friend before he gets you. We’d been put at each other’s throats; the only winner would be Ferris F. Fremont. The police have been using the same tricks since the time of the Medes, and people are still falling for them. As soon as Nicholas reported on anyone, especially for money, he would be vulnerable to police blackmail forever. The police had laid a noose out before him, and Nicholas was obligingly placing his head in it. He was doing most of the work. Where was the man who had damaged his gun rather than submit to taking military training involuntarily as a price for his college degree? Gone down the drain of prosperity, evidently; now Nicholas had a cushy job and great prospects, not to mention power over other people. That was what had done it. Idealism had given way to more realistic motivations: safety and authority and the protection of a family. Time had worked a dismal magic on my friend; he no longer strode along the pavement chanting old marching songs from the Spanish Civil War; in fact, if some young artist were to come to him with such lyrics, Nicholas would be in a position to pick up an easy hundred dollars.

  “Here is what I will do,” I told Nicholas, “if you spy for the government. First, I will phone the brass at Progressive and tell them. Second, I will park my car out front of your main entrance, and when I see young artists going up the walk with their guitars and high hopes and absolute trust in you, I will stop them and tell them you are a paid—”

  “Shit,” Nicholas said.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  “Well, I guess I can’t do it.” He looked relieved.

  “That’s right,” I said. “You can’t do it.”

  “They’ll destroy me. It’s just like when the FBI men came by originally; it’s me they’re after. Do you know the possible consequences if they harm Valis?”

  “Valis can take care of himself,” I said.

  “But I can’t,” Nicholas said.

 
; “In that case you’re no different from the rest of us,” I said. “Because neither can I.”

  That appeared to be the end of the conversation. The moral of it, I could have pointed out to Nicholas, is that if you are contemplating informing on people you should tell no one. Telling me had been a mistake, since I had immediately been flooded by visions of his informing on me.

  11THAT night I myself received a phone call from a cop, one whom I knew.

  “A lot of people have access to your house, don’t they?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said.

  “I have a tip I’m passing on to you. Someone is hiding dope in your house and the local FAP knows about it. If we’re sent over to look for it and we find it we’ll have to arrest you.”

  “Even though you know someone else is hiding it?”

  “That’s right,” the cop said. “That’s the law. Better find it and flush it before we’re called to go over there.”

  I spent the rest of the night looking for it. In all I found five stashes of drugs in five separate places, one even inside the phone itself. I destroyed all of it, but for all I knew I missed some. There was no way I could be sure. And whoever it was could plant more.

  The following day two FAPers came by to visit me. These were young: a slender youth in a white shirt, slacks, and tie, and with him a girl in a long skirt. They could have been Mormon missionaries, but both wore the FAR armband. It was the really young FAPers who were the worst, so I was not very happy to see these two people. The FAPer youth were the zealous spearheads.

  “May we sit down?” the boy said brightly.

  “Sure,” I said, not moving. My friend the cop had warned me just in time.

  The girl, seated on my couch with her hands folded, said. “We have mutual friends. Nicholas Brady.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes,” the boy said. “We’re friends of his. He’s talked about you a great deal—you’re a writer, aren’t you?”